My sister is a graphic designer and makes good money.
I know they meant painter but graphic designer is probably one of the most important jobs if we’re talking about business. A company without some sort of graphic is dead in the water.
Guessing this might be non-essential workers as per covid lockdowns, ie how important it is for them to attend a workplace in person, but it’s definitely funnier if it is a ranked list of perceived importance to society, so let’s go with that
Its right about telemarketing
Artist? I think the job was passed off to the first person passing the bosses desk.
Always remember, music is also art. Now imagine a world where theres no music. You can’t listen to anything while driving, riding the bus, going shopping etc.
I don’t listen to anything in any of those scenarios.
Many people are not listening music 24/7.
Music is nice, I don’t say it’s not. But you could 100% live without it.
You can listen to things while driving, but it is either NPR, talk radio, or church sermons.
I don’t even… this thought is so vile. It’s bumming me out and I already agreed with you, I didn’t need this analogy. Fuck that’s depressing… FUCK!
People might actually start singing again
Not NPR, that’s writing and journalism, which id argue is definitely an art.
Have fun with 500 versions of Alex Jones though.
I think I’d kill myself if I had to listen to NPR’s Up First without the jingle. I think that jingle keeps me sane.
It’s not that I disagree with the principle, but on the mentioned occastions, I will ~99% of the time listen to podcasts or audio books instead of music.
You might be shocked to learn that books is art, too.
I mean everything could be considered art if you look at it from the right angle :o
Books are a creative endeavor. Putting the same screw 10000 isn’t a creative endeavor.
Sure, but novels, paintings, and songs are traditional arts, they are art first and foremost.
The code I write might be considered abstract art by some, but I’m a developer, not an artist. Much like how someone who writes books get catagorized as an author even though books can be considered art.
Yeah it would suck but it is pretty unnecessary in terms of survival and productivity.
Social media manager and telemarketers are far more useless though. So I disagree with the list
Hard disagree. Humanity flourished when we had the free time to think, play, and create instead of just hunting and gathering all the time. Language, collaboration, imagination all grew thanks to art.
Culture doesn’t exist without art.
The rest of that column is basically “mosquitos”, blegh. Maybe we can get some birds to eat them.
That’s about right.
You can tell this is a poll of what people perceive to be the important jobs because doctor is #1. The most important jobs by sector in order of importance for developed nations is
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power supply- we all need electricity and few of us have the ability to generate it ourselves
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water supply- getting enough clean water for your day to cook and wash is a near full time job. For Americans a gallon of water is roughly 8lbs and your average toilet uses 3-5 gallons per flush. It would take much of the day to get and purify the water you use
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sanitation workers- this the poll got right. The folks collecting waste do more directly for public health than most doctors could hope to do.
What about the least essential?
- Tax consultants - helping companies avoid contributing to society
- Marketeers - manipulating people into buying worse products for higher prices
- Middle management - causing a lot of fuzz while doing nothing of significance.
Just to name a few. An artists contribution may be abstract but it’s certainly there. There are others that actively sabotage society and very often they make a lot of money.
I had similar thoughts. Someone more knowledgeable would probably call them “healthcare professionals”, or “healthcare practitioners”, not “doctors and nurses”.
And you’re right, as important as they are, they can’t do their jobs without the infrastructure you’re pointing out. Power and water are more essential, as they enable everyone all of the time. And waste piling up would create serious problems fairly quickly.
This reminds me of the Silo series, where every level thinks they keep the Silo running.
For modern society, sure. For foundational society, you don’t have any societies without Farmers, Educators, and some sort of doctor.
We had hunter gatherer societies with none of those jobs.
Sure, but we didn’t have even ancient cities without them
Cites come after societies form though so they aren’t foundational.
I wonder if doctors get elevated on these polls because people feel like it is a more unattainable skill.
I would imagine a lot of people (falsely) assume that it would be easy to plop people into power plants to keep them running, but harder to replace doctors.
My completely unknowledgeable take is that if we had to pick and choose people for the post apocalypse job hunt, we would want way more mechanics and engineers than doctors. Doctors need a lot of hard to obtain stuff to do the most doctor-ey part of their jobs, and if we aren’t worried about laws and regulations, then we don’t need them for things like prescriptions.
Most of what they would be needed for in that scenario to me seems like emergency care, like first aid, which you don’t really need all the superfluous med school training for.
Meanwhile, the hydroelectric dam that the new post apocalypse group is forming at needs a lot of varied disciplines and specialties just to keep it running.
I love that hypothetical apocalyptical world were babies apparently don’t exist, and therefore, a large chunk of the deaths that were pervasive in humanity until not too long ago also stopped existing
How is the doctor going to provide any legitimate care that the new technology of the world brings if there is no one to generate the power or source the complex and fragile medications and tools.
Do you think doctors will be administrating epidurals and doing c sections when the works ends? Hell, modern doctors only really work because of an entire industry of health care professionals that support them.
A doctor without pharmacology, engineering, clean rooms, manufacturing facilities, etc. is just a guy who can do first aid (and that’s assuming they worked and studied in a field that would deal with immediate trauma scenarios). Doctors have benefits because they can capitalize on the support system that is international health care.
I have more confidence that an engineer could figure out how to repair, assemble, and operate an MRI machine than a doctor. I also have more confidence in the care that an EMT would provide if I’m lying bleeding.
90 percent of doctors are just dudes who mis diagnose women and minorities and spend most of their time writing prescriptions for tylenol.
When it comes down to what is actually necessary, I think most doctors are not, so if we are ranking professions based on their importance, I would rank the jobs that even enable doctors to do what they do higher.
Also, not to be morbid, but humanity fared pretty well up until now, and for most of the few hundred thousand years we have been around, we handled babies the same way the rest of the animal kingdom did, by just continuing to spit them out and hope for the best.
Hell, the biggest medical advances aren’t even done by doctors they are done by scientists, doctors just apply shit they read out of a book.
I’m honestly surprised that cleaner and garbage collector are as high up there on the list as they are because those seem to be jobs that society generally looks down on.
At least the graphic has that going for it.
Wonder if it was a poll during 2020. COVID really highlighted cleaners’ jobs as essential.
I assume this is why we hear about foreign actors targeting power stations more than hospitals.
Without power all those hospitals are nearly useless. Sure there are backup generators but they only run the bare minimum and only for so long.
Disable the power grid and the affects will be catastrophic on any developed nation. All the food will be spoiled within a few days to a few weeks. No business will be able to run including gas stations. Most communication will be down.
The whole area grinds to a halt untill power can be restored. Do enough damage to take out the power for a week to a large city and the damage will be incalculable. Not to mention the lives lost in that time.
This is also why GWB tried to redo the US electrical grid but failed. It is a huge target that needs to be updated.
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But what about telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants?
Is this the list from Hitchhiker’s Guide?
yes
Those go on the other ship
Telemarketer should’ve been number 1.
Haven’t you noticed? People love to be advertised at these days.
Yes, my PR Specialist told me so it has to be true.
Ignoring phone calls is the highlight of my day. Every day. For years.
Kill me please.
Unfortunately sales calls are extremely effective.
Which column?
Anything advertising related is utterly useless.
Is that why pretty much every company spends so much money on it?
Art is important for people’s well being, which is important for essential workers’ ability to work. Weird thst artists are considered less essential than telemarketers.
I recall watching a singer saying something like the following during an interview “If art and culture are so worthless, return all the time you spent watching movies and series, return all the time you spent listening to music, all the poems and lyrics you sang with friends or to loved ones. I won’t ask you to return the stories you read because it’s clear you don’t read.”
I can possibly see an argument that “artist” isn’t an essential job because people make loads of art when it’s not their job anyway. Nobody’s doing telemarketing as their hobby
However I very much doubt that this was the actual context for whatever this graphic was trying to show
I can’t even joke “when has art ever sold dick pills?” because colorful gas station packages conceivably outsell telemarketers on that front.
If you think artists are non-essential, try teaching a technophobic boomer to renew their driver license through a terminal command.
A good UI has nothing to do with art. In fact, art leads to terrible UI.
UX designers are artists. UX design is art.
This is too philosophical to be practical imo.
If the argument is that everything that requires creativity (read: requires independent thoughts and conclusions) is art, then the definition starts to become useless.
UX design is creative, but it isn’t always art, following rigid accessibility guidelines set by governing bodies isn’t art, even if you sometimes need to be creative in your implementation.
A good UX design will guide the user’s eyes to certain places, just like a good painting.
I think we can both agree that graphic design is art, and UX design, in my opinion, is an extension of graphic design, with the requirement that the user be able to navigate and interact with the graphics, not just receive and understand the information it contains.
I don’t think that terminal interface design, even though it requires creativity, is art in this sense, because the creative expression is solely meant to be functional. In a good UX design, the creative expression is not only meant to be functional, but also to evoke certain feelings and convey certain attitudes. Think about how the McDonalds self order kiosks need to both be functional, in that you can find what you want and place your order, but also evoke feelings about each item and convey an attitude of friendliness to the user. This is a different type of UX design than, say, a bank, which needs to convey an attitude of professionalism and evoke a feeling of safety.
I am a software engineer, and when I used to design a user interface, it was always pretty terrible for your average user. For an example, look at PNotify, which I designed over a decade ago. I am learning art (I’ve been painting for a few years), and through that, I think I’ve gotten better at UX design. You can see the progression in SMUI, which I made several years later, around 2018, then in Port87, which I made recently. I’m still not great at UX design, but learning more about the visual arts has definitely helped me improve.
Sometimes terrible art, but still art.
non-essential jobs is about everyone with a MBA
I was told once there was an MBA program offered through work and I could think was something like, “Why would I want a degree in bull shit when I already have a useful degree?” (Mechanical Engineering)
Hey, cleaners are second most important, they must be paid super well, right?
… Right?
I used to think this was true while working for a B2B company as a graphic designer. Everything just seemed pointless like I wasn’t contributing anything meaningful to the world. But I do think that art in its many forms contributes meaningfully to culture in general and can also be quite powerful when used well. History of graphic design shows just how influential designs were in Nazi Germany and how similar techniques are still used today. Then there is the matter of UI design and how it’s increasingly become essential today. While most applications it’s fine to have a frustrating piece of garbage, UI is rather important for things like medical systems, car displays, and other areas where getting it wrong could mean life or death. Unfortunately my job is still pretty useless to society regardless of these points made. I’ll go back to my corner now.
I used to think this was true while working for a B2B company as a graphic designer. Everything just seemed pointless like I wasn’t contributing anything meaningful to the world.
You could say similar things about company doctors that just try to get people back to work without caring for their wellbeing. Companies do not necessarily bring out the best possible use of skills.
company doctors
Never heard of this outside of medical facilities. I don’t know how it could possibly be cost effective to employ a doctor because management thinks people are out sick too much—fire the fucking manager that can’t keep the office staffed.
There are countries where you cannot fire people just because they got sick. In those countries you’d have to keep paying the sick people and it becomes cost effective to employ a doctor to help them get to work again.
As someone who works for a major healthcare company - they hire doctors so they can claim to have legitimacy in denying claims. If their doctors say that something is “unnecessary” or there is an alternative, it’s better for legal purposes than just any old person saying it. Even though we all know those doctors aren’t the ones in charge and are most likely pushed by the people above to make certain decisions.
